Author: Dave LIndorff

After two years of being denied appropriate treatment for his active Hepatitis-C infection, Mumia Abu-Jamal, a black journalist and activist who has been in a Pennsylvania jail for 35 years, 29 of them on death row, will finally receive the latest medicine to treat the deadly disease, but according to Amy Worden, a spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Corrections, the only reason for this is that, as she put it in a statement to Washington, DC television news station “inmates are prioritized for treatment based on the progression of the disease.” She claimed that, “based on recent testing, he’s now eligible.”

The DOC had informed the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in a status report filed today about the decision to start offering treatment — which involves giving him 12-24 weeks of daily anti-viral pills, but without that dire explanation for the department’s change in handling his case. The department currently has an appeal pending before the Third Circuit, asking that panel to stay a lower federal district court’s injunction ordering immediate treatment to be offered to Abu-Jamal. Last week, the Third Circuit judicial panel had rejected that appeal for a stay and Abu-Jamal’s attorneys were preparing to ask District Judge Robert Mariani to find the DOC in contempt and to order an immediate start to the medication.

Johanna Fernandez, a member of Abu-Jamal’s legal team, tells ThisCantBeHappening! that Abu-Jamal is “quite angry.” She reports that on Friday he told her that “The prison doctor visited with him today to say that he has developed cirrhosis. In short, the prison has allowed his condition to worsen, and although it is expected that he will recover once he gets the Hep C cure, he and others who develop cirrhosis are more likely to develop liver cancer over the course of their lives.”

Ab-Jamal’s own doctor has not been shown the prison medical records yet, and thus cannot comment on the claim that he has cirrhosis.

The DOC’s denial of treatment has been going on for exactly two years, dating from March 30, 2015, when inmate Abu-Jamal, already suffering from a terrible skin rash and unexplained dramatic weight loss, collapsed and had to be rushed out of the prison to a hospital, where he was diagnosed with serious case of diabetes. That’s when he was finally tested to see if he had a Hepatic C viral load in his blood (he did).

The DOC already had known at the time for three years that Abu-Jamal had contracted the potentially deadly virus, thanks to a routine blood test he was given as part of the process of transferring him from the super-max SCI-Greene death row prison outside Pittsburg to his current regular-population prison at SCI Mahanoy, where he is now serving a sentence of life without parole following the overturning of his death sentence on constitutional grounds.

Pennsylvania drops effort to deny Hep-C medicine to Mumia after a 3rd Circuit panel denies latest appeal for a stay of a lower court order demanding that treatement begin.
 

Since the discovery of the active infection, which medical experts say is the reason he suddenly contracted a serious case of diabetes and which also explains several other debilitating ailments he has been suffering, the DOC has fought a two-year legal battle against efforts by Abu-Jamal and his attorneys to obtain the appropriate medicines available for treating his underlying Hep-C infection.

Economist Dean Baker, in an article published at NationofChange, complains that the New York Times never explains the federal budget in a way that Americans can comprehend, because it publishes big numbers, like the $17.3 billion budgeted to be spent on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or the $40 billion budgeted to be spent on foreign aid this year, but never notes that neither of those “big” numbers amounts to even 1% of the 2017 federal budget. His critique is correct as far as it goes, but like all too many liberal analysts, Baker studiously fails to note a few really BIG numbers in the budget that also don’t get mentioned by the Times and the rest of the corporate media, either as a number or as a percentage.

This is a big failing of the liberal left: not calling out the Hannibal’s war elephant in the room.

Military spending, even when it does get reported, is often only referred to in terms of the increase being proposed, without the total budget outlay ever being provided. It is reported (including in the Times!) wrong in so many ways. For example, while the actual Pentagon budget outlay is sometimes mentioned, the amount of the interest on the debt that is for prior military spending that was financed through borrowing is not included. Nor is the spending on veterans’ health care, which is surely part of military spending. Nor is the share of the Energy Department budget that is for nuclear weapons included. According to the National Priorities Project, the 2015 budget for the military was $598 billion, which represented 54% of all federal discretionary spending. That number didn’t include over $100 billion in veterans spending and $26 billion for nuclear weapons, bringing the total to about $730 billion. 2015 total discretionary spending was $1.1 trillion,so including nuke spending and veterans spending, spending on the military represented 63% of the total. In other words two-thirds of your tax bill!

(National Priorities Project chart)
 

(This article was written on assignment for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and was published on March 21 at www.FAIR.org
 

The New York Times on March 12 reported that the Trump administration, for a variety of reasons, was filling the offices of administrative agencies at a glacial pace. From the Department of Agriculture to the Weather Service, over 2,000 mid-level political-appointee positions were still unfilled; the Times called it “the slowest transition in decades.”

One place that slowness has showed up clearly is in the staffing of what are variously called Public Affairs offices, Newsrooms or Media Offices of these government departments and agencies—the very offices that reporters in both Washington bureaus and in newsrooms around the country depend on to get routine information about what these departments and agencies are doing, or, in the case of more investigative assignments, to ask basic questions and set up interviews with key personnel…

Image of the ‘Media Contacts’ page of the Trump Administration Commerce Department on March 22 over two months into Trump’s presidency
 

For the rest of this article, please go to: FAIR.org

There only was and only will be one Jimmy Breslin, and after his death last Sunday at 88, he is no more.

Funny, cranky and sometimes boorish, Breslin was a working class journalist who cared about the working class and the under and un-employed class and who, despite achieving wealth and pinnacles of journalistic success, from a Pulitzer and a Polk award to movie options and best-selling novels, never forgot his roots.

How many journalists have your read in a major newspaper or magazine, or heard bloviating on the air, young or old, who’ve had the courage and fortitude to do as Breslin did in his old age: finding a refrigerator box and setting himself up in the dead of winter on a heating grate on a New York City sidewalk alongside a bunch of other homeless people so he could write with real understanding about how they live? That was some column, and provided a jolting wake-up to New Yorkers who walk by those boxes every day, usually without a thought to who’s huddled inside them.

How many have had the courage to call out the likes of Hillary Clinton when she was a carpetbagger running for Senate from New York State, for having “blood on her hands” as she waved to the crowds?

How many have shared his outrage at learning how much money the Standard Oil Company paid to have a marketing company develop a new name and logo for the company, changing Esso to Exxon (that was one of the funniest of his columns I ever read, full of extraneous Xs whose value he placed at something like a million dollars per keystroke after learning what Exxon had paid a naming firm for its new corporate logo).

I’m pretty sure the answer to all these questions is the same: none.

Breslin did all that and much, much more.

New York columnist Jimmy Breslin, 1930-2017
 

But the problem isn’t, as most obit writers have been saying, that there aren’t journalists out there who have Breslin’s sensibility and sensitivity to wrongdoing, if not perhaps his unique gift for getting close to people who don’t normally open up to a reporter. There are. It isn’t that there aren’t journalists out there who are actually writing the kinds of incisive and eye-opening pieces that Breslin spent his life writing. There are. It isn’t even that there aren’t journalists with a similar literary talent. There are.

The problem is that there are no longer any newspapers whose publishers and senior editors are willing to run such gritty Establishment-demolishing and icon-attacking pieces in their columns and on their opinion pages.

Years ago, newspapers ran columns by the likes of Breslin, Anthony Lewis, Pete Hamill, Mike Royko, Molly Ivens and Joe Bageant — columns that could leave the reader fuming, racing for pen and paper or typewriter to knock off an angry letter to the paper or to a Congressperson, columns that would have you running to a friend or a spouse to read it aloud to them, columns that simply made you think about something or some people you hadn’t though of before. No more. It’s the rare column in a mainstream news outlet these days that can elicit outrage, make the blood boil, or even bring a tear to the eye.

I currently receive a Social Security benefit check of $985 a month, which is a spousal benefit I qualified for, one of the last to be able to make use of the so-called file-and-suspend option for married people reaching age 66 that the Obama Administration and Congress agreed to do away with two years ago, in one of many small cuts being applied to the Social Security program.

This year that benefit, like the benefit checks of all 60 million people (one in five of all Americans) on Social Security, rose by a scant 0.3 percent, taking my check from $983 a month last year to its present level — a rise of $2.00 a month (I was actually screwed out of a dollar because of crooked rounding!).

Now we learn that the Federal Reserve is raising the benchmark interest rate a notch because inflation is actually running at close to 2 percent — the “target” of the Federal Reserve Bank’s policy makers for achieving what they call a “health economy.”

Now don’t tell me that inflation was running at 0.3 percent last year and that it’s now 2.0% three months later. We didn’t just have a huge 1.7% jump in prices of everything over the past three months.

The truth: This is a screw job on the elderly and the disabled, pure and simple.

The claim that our costs of living didn’t really change over the course of 2016 was a fraud. Everyone knows it. Food prices rose dramatically last year. So did fuel costs, for both heating and driving. Transportation costs rose, and so did car prices. Rents went up, and so did interest rates on borrowing for a home or a home equity loan. And health care costs — a big one for the Social Security set — rose 6.5%, which is what they’re expected to rise by this year too. And do you know what percent of their income the elderly spend on healthcare? It’s 20% across the board. Since it’s safe to say that nothing the elderly (or anyone else) has had to buy in 2016 got any cheaper, clearly our cost of living rose a damn sight more than the measly joke of an increase of 0.3 percent that we saw (or didn’t notice) in our benefit checks!

Clearly Congress should be revisiting this year’s cost-of-living adjustment and making it match what the Fed says inflation has really been. It’s wrong for the government to be keeping a double set of books on something like this, yet that is exactly what they’re doing! (The Fed uses the BLS’s so-called Core-CPI Index, which has been running at 1-2 percent a year for several years, while the Social Security Administration, by act of Congress, uses the so-called CPI-W Index, which has been under-reporting inflation for years and in the past couple of years, led to a zero increase in Social Security benefits for 2016 and a next-to-nothing 0.3 percent benefit increase for this year.)

But I’m not holding my breath for any action on that front. This is the Congress that at this moment is attempting to pass a bill killing the so-called Affordable Care Act and replacing it with a Republican measure that besides throwing 24 million people (many of them elderly) off their ACA-subsidized health insurance plans, will increase the cost of supplemental health insurance (the insurance that covers doctors and drugs, as Medicare only covers hospital care) by as much as — hang on to your seats — 750 percent!

It’s almost like the Republican party took to heart the idea of a wretched former Democratic Governor of Colorado, Richard Lamm, who famously said back in 1984, at the tender age of 48, in a discussion on the rising cost of health care with respect to the elderly who have the gall to make use of costly medical care to try and live longer: ”You’ve got a duty to die and get out of the way. Let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life.”

The so-called Deep State and Democratic Party campaign to demonize Russia for allegedly “hacking the US election,” and delivering the country into the hands of Donald Trump suffered a huge and probably mortal blow this week with the release by WikiLeaks of over 7000 secret CIA documents disclosing secret CIA hacking technologies.

The case being made against Russia as being the source of leaked emails of the Democratic National Committee and of Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta — documents that proved that the DNC had been corrupting the primary process in favor of corporatist candidate Hillary Clinton and undermining the campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and that also revealed the embarrassing contents of Clinton’s highly paid secret speeches to a number of giant Wall Street banks — had always been tenuous, with no hard evidence ever presented. All the intelligence agencies would say was that they had a “high degree of certainty,” or “strong reason to believe” that the Russians were the source of the deeply damaging documents late in the campaign season.

Adding to doubts that Russia had actually hacked the DNC was WikiLeaks itself, which insisted that it had obtained the DNC and Podesta emails not from a hack of computers, but from several internal DNC staffers who actually pulled them off computers with a thumb drive and provided them to the organization. One of those leakers was later identified as Seth Rich, who was mysteriously murdered on his way home from DNC headquarters in Washington, shot in the back at night in an unsolved case that the local police quickly labeled a “botched burglary,” although nothing was taken from his body by his assailant — not his wallet or watch even. (Wikileaks has offered a $20,000 reward for information that helps solve that uninvestigated case.)

But one thing the blame-Russia conspiracy theorists did have going for them was their assertion that the leaked DNC documents contained routing information and ISPs that pointed to Russia as the source of the hacks.

Now, however, the new CIA documents released by WikiLeaks — the first of a much larger trove of such documents that are reportedly going to be released as WikiLeaks goes through them to remove information that might jeopardize agents or national security — show that among the technologies and hacking tools that the CIA has been using to attack targeted computers, internet servers and even so-called “smart” appliances in people’s homes, like Samsung TV sets, are a number of Russian-developed hacking programs.

As the New York Times wrote in its article on the latest Wikileaks document release, which it is calling “Vault 7”:
 

Another program described in the documents, named Umbrage, is a voluminous library of cyber-attack techniques that the CIA has collected from malware produced by other countries, including Russia. According to the WikiLeaks release, the large number of techniques allows the CIA to mask the origin of some of its attack and confuse forensic investigators.

The WikiLeaks material includes lists of software tools that the CIA uses to create exploits and malware to carry out hacking. Many of the tools are those used by developers around the world: coding languages, such as Python, and tools like Sublime Text, a program used to write code, and Git, a tool that helps developers collaborate.”
 

The Democratic Party leadership, both in the Democratic National Committee and in Congress, is full of bad ideas these days, and they’re risking disaster because of it.

After the November election fiasco, you’d think a party that is left controlling the governments of just 13 of the 50 states, compared to 32 for Republicans, and that has just lost every lever of power in Washington — the White House, the Senate, the House and the Supreme Court — would be rethinking its whole approach to reaching American voters and trying to figure out where it went wrong over the last several decades.

Instead we’re hearing a whole lot of the same old bad ideas, and some new ones that are even worse than bad.

Take Nancy Pelosi, the dinosaur representative from San Francisco who once was the House speaker, back when Democrats controlled that lower chamber of Congress (bad idea one was rewarding her with the continued role of minority leader of the House!). Pelosi, who at this point should have no credibility as a strategist, argues that Democrats should “just wait” until Trump voters realize that they have been misled by their candidate, on the assumption that they will then flock to the Democratic Party in 2018.

Just wait? Doesn’t Pelosi get it yet? America’s working class — black, hispanic and white — has been “waiting” years in vain for the Democratic Party to come back to its roots and start helping them, instead of helping the toney entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and the toney hedge-fund managers on Wall Street to get richer? Wait for what? Voters both independent and Democratic abandoned the Democratic Party in droves in November because they finally woke up and realized it had abandoned them, and that “just waiting” for them to come back to a party that betrayed them is not going to work at all.

As I’ve written, plenty of those “deplorables” who voted for Trump in states that used to be reliably Democratic first voted in the Democratic primary for Bernie Sanders, either as Democratic Party registrants or as independents. They only turned to Trump when the choice was Trump or Clinton, whom they recognized as corporatist Democratic party hack. Many have told pollsters and interviewers that they voted for Trump and the Republicans not because they liked them, but to “shake things up” because the Democrats have been ignoring their plight.

This whole winter has been anomalously warm in southeastern Pennsylvania where I live. My oil guy, Hans, is complaining that the demand for home heating oil is so low this winter that it’s killing his business, causing him to lay off workers that he had already trained.

Like everything about climate change, and this is about climate change, as numerous scientific studies like this one are demonstrating, there are short-term benefits to some of what’s happening, of course. Han’s problems aside, on my end, my heating bill this winter is the lowest it’s been in the 20 years we’ve lived here, even factoring in the relatively low cost of oil. It is, for example, even lower than it was last year when the price of oil was lower than today. And who’s going to complain about this week, when our temperatures, for a five-day stretch, have been in the mid 60 degrees to the low 70s? T-shirt weather! And no sign of a night-time frost looking out as far as 10 days from now.

I went outside yesterday, when the thermometer hit 68 in the afternoon, and pulled the pile of clear plastic that some six weeks ago I had tossed over a patch of swiss chard in my little fenced-in raised-bed vegetable garden during a stretch of colder weather when we had some nights drop into the teens, and the chard, which I had been able to nurse through this mild winter up until that colder period by just covering it lightly with one sheet of plastic at night, and exposing it during the daytime, was a lush green, with leaves rising about four inches above the ground. At this point, I don’t think I’ll have to cover the plants at night anymore as they can handle a mild frost, so at least one crop left from my last year’s garden will be up and running this year as of February.

Over-wintered swiss chard plants in the author’s garden, ready to start growing again in late February
 

On my way out of the house, my eyes were drawn to a few spots of bright blue on the ground, and looking down at a patch of overgrown weeds in a garden island in our sidewalk, I saw several blooming birds eye speedwell plants — an early flower I would still not expect to see around this region for another month.

There’s a delicious irony in the downfall of Michael Flynn, President Trump’s National Security Advisor, who resigned his post just 24 days after his appointment.

A retired three-star Lt. General, Flynn had previously been director of the Defense Intelligence Agency during the Obama administration. In that role since 2012, he was a key player in the leadership of the sprawling $50-billion US intelligence apparatus that has increasingly been spying not just on Americans but on US allies and, to the extent possible, on the entire world. Flynn, as DIA director, was the top guy in charge of the so-called “Five Eyes” group of intelligence agencies– all English-speaking nations including the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada — which has coordinated spying on citizens of those nations as well as on the citizens and leaders of such supposed NATO allies as Germany, France, Italy, Spain etc.

Knowing all this, it’s simply astounding to learn that Flynn himself was using apparently unencrypted email, phones and texting to communicate with, of all people, the Russian Ambassador to the US, Sergei Kislyak, discussing such issues as potentially lifting sanctions imposed on Russia by the sitting president of the United States, Barack Obama.

Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was brought down by the intel monster he helped to create
 

His political implosion is doubly ironic because Flynn was one of those during the election campaign who was loudly condemning Trump’s presidential opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for her use of a private server for her official State Department business, and for her general lax security standards (he actually led a “Lock her up!” chant at one Trump rally!). However, it turns out Flynn himself was not using secure communications in his own conversations with the Russian ambassador — communications that are now widely circulating in embarrassingly complete transcript form courtesy of US spy agencies like the National Security Agency.

Talk about someone being hoist with his own petard!

You’d think that seeing the kind of trouble the NSA’s “collect it all” motto can wreak even for the powerful and seemingly invincible, Washington’s elite might rethink what the NSA is doing?

But nah, I wouldn’t count on that happening. There’s more likely to be a lot of schadenfreude among those, both Democrats and traditional Cold War Republicans, who want to see Trump and his band of bozos go down, but hubristic to a fault, they’re not going to go so far as to think, “Hey, this could as easily happen to me!”

A methane hydrate deposit erupts suddenly from the sea floor off the northern coast of Norway
 

Reports from the Arctic are getting pretty grim.

The latest, from a blog called Arctic News, warns that by 2026 — that’s just nine years from now — warming above the Arctic Circle could be so extreme that a massively disrupted and weakened jet stream could lead to global temperature rises so severe that a massive extinction event, including humans, could result.

This latest blog post, written by Arctic News editor Sam Carana, draws on research by a number of scientists (linked in his article), who report on various feedback loops that will result from a dramatically warmer north polar region, even in winter. But the critical concern, he says, is methane already starting to be released in huge quantities from the shallow sea floor of the continental shelves north of Siberia and North America. That methane, produced by bacteria acting on biological material that sinks to the sea floor, for the most part, is currently lying frozen in a form of ice that is naturally created over millions of years by a mixing of methane and water, called a methane hydrate. Methane hydrate is a type of molecular structure called a clathrate. Clathrates are a kind of cage, in this case made of water ice, which traps another chemical, in this case methane. At normal temperatures, above the freezing temperature of water, these clathrates can only form under high pressures, such as a 500 meters or more under the ocean, and indeed such clathrates can be found under the sea floor even in places like the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, where the temperature is 8-10 degrees above freezing. But in colder waters, they can exist and remain stable at much shallower levels, such as a in a few hundred feet of water off the coast of Alaska or Siberia.

The concern is that if the Arctic Ocean waters, particularly nearer to shore, were to warm even slightly, as they will do as the ice cap vanishes in summer and becomes much thinner in winter, at some point the clathrates there will suddenly dissolve releasing tens of thousands of gigatons of methane in huge bursts. Already, scientists are reporting that portions of the ocean, as well as shallow lakes in the far north, look as though they are boiling, as released methane bubbles to the surface, sometimes in such concentrations that they can be lit on fire with a match as they surface.

As Carana writes:
 

“As the temperature of the Arctic Ocean keeps rising, it seems inevitable that more and more methane will rise from its seafloor and enter the atmosphere, at first strongly warming up the atmosphere over the Arctic Ocean itself — thus causing further methane eruptions — and eventually warming up the atmosphere across the globe.”